Healing with Mindfulness
Reflections on Cancer with Dr. Cathirose Petrone
Dr. Cathirose Petrone normalizes the word feral. She’s vigorously original, passionately
forthcoming, and persistently clad in slick black wear, embroidered and shrunken to
meet her tropical Balinese setting, of course. A naturopath and psychotherapist with
five degrees and originally from New Jersey, she has a professional record that looks
worthy of being thematized into a beatific mosaic inside a Roman cathedral.
Extraordinarily equable, she has no room for self-serving in her practice; her strength
and focus begin and end with her patients in mind and soul.
She’s been wholly forged into her
vocation; a special phenomenon in
any professional sphere or era. Twenty
years ago in Hawaii, her naturopathic
clinical internship instructor made her
peel mangos without breaking the
skin in two, and had her tiny frame
routinely lug around bulky hoses to
water the vast gardens. The point was
to make her fully present when consulting her patients and the nature of their diseases.
And she bites off exactly what she can chew. She gives me some Jersey-style ‘tough
love’ then mollifies the loving abrasions with her novel, perhaps atypical approach to
healing. “Everybody who’s alive has cancer in a sense,” her eyes wide and true, about
five centimeters from my face. “We all have abnormal cells capable of growing
uncontrollably. But the body deals with them until it doesn’t anymore.”
We began our conversations on her purple patio in the Socratic tradition, by discussing
the popular symbolism of particular terms, here in our context the dubious character of